Chiaroscuro
Look. I’m all out of words. They started drifting away from me this morning, when I woke up with the boy at six a.m. As the day continued – conversation with the visitors, trudging off to music class, trudging back, stopping at the store, fixing lunch for the visitors, making conversation with the visitors, entertaining my son, taking care of our various animals, fixing dinner, putting the exhausted child to bed, making more conversation with the visitors – the words just left.
I say I was making conversation with the visitors, but the truth is that by the end of the day I was mainly nodding and sighing sympathetically. It was all I had left. So here I am, bereft of creativity, my mind swimming with stories of thyroid nodules and nerves like tangled spiders’ webs, of early deaths and shattered psyches. What’s in store for me? Should I be so smug about my flexible back and thin, muscular legs? Should I be grateful that my mother taught me the proper way to eat? Or that I inherited her frame and general good health? Maybe I will fulfill my genetic heritage some day soon: develop an autoimmune disease, succumb to the rot of debilitating depression, start to feel my legs tingle and fret as if they were plugged into the wall.
Part II:
Resonance
OK, OK,
OK, Part I was the result yet another prompt, from a
family visit in September. It was a photo prompt that
had nothing to do with the resulting piece. I was
going through my old stuff, looking for something,
saw this, thought: Aha! That feeling some of us get
after too much family time on Thanksgiving. Except I
haven't gone home for Thanksgiving in years, and if I
did, it would actually be wonderful to be with my
mother, though Kevin's
absence would still be
palpable.
Sometimes
I'm afraid that you're getting the wrong impression.
Maybe you think that I sit around immersing myself in
the past, feeling sorry for myself and penning
various memorials to the me who used to be. Or that I
prefer to
dance with darkness rather than frolic in joy and
light.
I write about what resonates and I have a complex
relationship with both happiness and the past. The
past is always present for me; it informs the
present, keeps me grounded. And it provides me with
great material. Don't even have to think about it. As
for happiness: I am capable of feeling great joy. I'm
generally happy, except when I'm
not.
The hollows, shadowy,
cold as falling snow, call to me. Light is
meaningless without darkness. I need texture, a rough
patch here and there, a little complexity and strife
to make it more interesting.
But maybe my next post will be about puppies. More
likely about finishing NaNoWriMo. Or my husband
wrapping up his dissertation. Or maybe it really will
be about puppies, cute little fluffballs, good enough
to eat.